I just found out that SteamPunk Magazine art editor Juan Navarro (who has been illustrating for us since issue #2, I believe!) has put his indie comic book publishing company, Creature Entertainment Studios, up on kickstarter. This isn’t an untested idea: the company is made up with experienced but day-jobbed comics creators who make all kinds of glorious pulpy comics and are distributed by Diamond, but in order to develop more lines of comics, they need more help.

And the rewards they’re offering are varied, available cheap, and really interesting. Everything from hand-drawn art to out-of-print comics to “A team of us will develop your idea into a comic.”

As an aside, I’m a huge fan of crowd-funding. I love how it democratizes art. In ye olde days, you had have a patron from the church or royalty in order to make your living off of art–hell, even to have the resources to make really interesting art. Then, in the bad-old 20th century, it switched and you had to have a corporate patron. They preferred the word “sponsor,” of course. Either way, your ability to make art was dictated by the whims of the elite, the same as before. And now we can do it ourselves. And that’s fucking awesome.